Iron Man | Creators, Stories, Movies, & Facts - Britannica

From “Armor Wars” to the silver screen

The story line took a dramatic turn in the 1980s, under the writing team of David Michelinie and Bob Layton and artist John Romita, Jr. Stark International was suddenly hit by industrial espionage, and, as a despairing Stark took to drinking, Rhodes took his place in the Iron Man armour. Stark’s ongoing battle with alcoholism would become a recurring theme in subsequent years. One especially notable story in this era was the “Armor Wars” saga, which pitted Iron Man against a stable of armoured villains who had capitalized on stolen Stark designs. The 1990s were characterized by uneven stories that too frequently relied on Stark’s apparent death as a plot device. As the Vietnam War became an increasingly distant historical event, Iron Man’s origin was reimagined to have taken place during the Persian Gulf War.

In the early stories of the 21st century, Tony Stark publicly revealed his identity as Iron Man and even served as U.S. secretary of defense. Stark played a major role in Marvel’s Civil War (2006–07) event, and he briefly served as the director of the law-enforcement agency S.H.I.E.L.D.

Fan backlash in the wake of Civil War—a story that pitted hero against hero, with Stark serving as the primary antagonist—led to the rebooting of the Iron Man franchise, and writer Matt Fraction and artist Salvador Larroca redefined the character with their award-winning run on Invincible Iron Man (2008–12). When Stark was beaten into a coma during the second Civil War event (2016), the Iron Man persona was assumed by Riri Williams, a brilliant African American teenager who had reverse engineered an Iron Man suit. She eventually adopted the crime-fighting name Ironheart. An alternate version of Iron Man was one of the original members of the title team in The Ultimates, a series about the Avengers’ counterparts in a parallel universe, and he was featured in two Ultimate Iron Man comics miniseries (2005–06 and 2007–08), written by science-fiction author Orson Scott Card.

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Animated versions of Iron Man have appeared on television in The Marvel Super Heroes (1966), Iron Man (1994–96), Iron Man: Armored Adventures (2008–12), and The Super Hero Squad Show (2009–11), as well as in the direct-to-video animated films Ultimate Avengers (2006) and The Invincible Iron Man (2007).

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Marvel Studios and Paramount released the live-action Iron Man in 2008. The film, an enormous commercial and critical success, was directed by Jon Favreau and starred Robert Downey, Jr., who proved adept at capturing Tony Stark’s personality, brilliance, and charisma. Favreau and Downey returned for the sequel Iron Man 2 (2010).

Downey became a mainstay of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, reprising his role for The Avengers (2012), Iron Man 3 (2013), Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Captain America: Civil War (2016), Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), Avengers: Infinity War (2018), and Avengers: Endgame (2019).

David Roach Peter Sanderson The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica